Beyond Blessed

I never want to take my life for granted. For whatever reason, God has allowed me to raise my family in one of the easiest-to-live-in countries in the world. There are jobs. There is abundant food. There is a government that is solid (as in, no cu in the works). We have a car. We have luxuries like clean water and electricity. When we are sick, there is medical care.

Last night I was talking to my mom about some recent things with Bright. His challenges can be very difficult sometimes. It makes us sad to see him suffer, and to see our other children be affected by his issues. My mom was saying typical supportive mom stuff. "I don't know how you do it." "You do a great job." "How can we help."

I said the typical daughter stuff in response. "It's fine mom." "We'll make it." "My life is great." Except, I really meant it. Every family has stinky stuff to deal with. God gives some families more to deal with than others. But I'm so thankful that for everything difficult, there are even more blessings.

Last Friday I was telling Eric that the clothes dryer issue was really getting to me. The "issue" being that whenever we ran it, it did this horrible screeching squeaky thing. Imagine fingernails on a chalkboard at the same time as a fork scratching across a plate. That's sort of it. Even with the laundry room door closed the sound physically affected me. It gave me a headache. Once the headache was there, my patience wore thin with the kids. I wanted to crawl out of my skin by the time we left the house to go and get Eric last Friday! I admitted that if this dryer sound was the most pressing issue in my life, I had a pretty great life! I asked if we could start thinking about a new dryer. Ours had served us well for 13 years, but maybe it needed to retire!

By Saturday at noon I had a new dryer in my house. Well, new to us. It's probably 10+ years old but it's like super duper plus capacity and (most importantly) it doesn't squeak! In the process we realized our dryer vent was almost totally clogged. Hmm...no wonder it took us 3 hours to dry a load! So now, we are living the high life with our great big dryer that actually dries clothes, in relative silence, in 60 minutes or less!

Wow. Our family is so blessed by my husband's job that we have the ability to buy a used dryer without saving for weeks. So many families couldn't do that.

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We're on the look out for fall/winter clothes for the kids. It's still 100+ here most days, so there is no great need yet. Still, I've been browsing craig's list for good deals. Someone posted 4 pairs of Children's Place jeans (Kendi size) for $16. Not fantastic, but they were in great condition and I like TCP. I contacted the seller. She said she also had shoes Kendi's size. 3 pairs for $9. Great. We got to meet her yesterday. She said she found some more jeans Kendi's size and threw them in there. I didn't look to see what was "extra" but offered to pay more for the additional clothes. She said nope. She wanted to bless us with them. [Yes, in OK that is normal talk between strangers.] =-) We got in the car and realized that she had blessed us with 4 extra pairs of jeans! And they were all in excellent condition. 8 pairs of Jeans for Lil' Bit! She doesn't need that many, so we can give some to a little cousin who is in need. So cool.

Yesterday our wonderful neighbors called to let us know they had found dirt clods in their pool over the weekend and again yesterday morning. Had our kids been playing in the back yard? Ugh. Long story short, Bright discovered dirt clods and discovered that he could throw them way over the fence to his beloved Gary and Carolyn. [He adores them. Wants to hang with them everyday. They are like a 3rd set of grandparents.] I talked to Bright about what happened when he threw the dirt clods--how it made Carolyn sad and it made Gary work for many hours to clean the pool--how nobody could swim in the pool if there were dirt clods in it. [They open their pool to us anytime we want to swim.] I asked Bright to draw a picture for them, to say he was sorry. I wrote the words and he traced them (except his name).

This is Bright and Carolyn holding hands, with Gary and Carolyn's house in the background, along with the fence. =-) This is a blessing to me. Bright has a wonderful loving heart. In the most difficult times with him, I only have to be reminded of the love in his heart. [In fact, he just came over here and saw his picture on the computer. He was happy. He said, "Awww! You're the best mom in the whole world!"] To add to the goodness, when we delivered the apology picture, Carolyn was sure to tell him, "Bright, I'm just crazy about you! No matter what, we love you." That's just exactly what my little one needed to hear. He was so worried that his Carolyn wouldn't love him anymore.

This post is just to highlight 3 blessings in as many days. The day I forget how blessed I am is the day the challenges have gotten the best of me. May it never happen!

Love,

Anita